


What Has Happened Between Us

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Life
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-11
Updated: 2008-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:24:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Did you and Charlie used to fuck when you were in prison?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Has Happened Between Us

**Author's Note:**

> Charlie Crews might say that we all, as humans and parts of the universe, belong to each other, and create and are created by each other. But legally speaking, you know, he's not mine.
> 
> Beta thanks to Nestra and Miss Molly Etc!

Ted is not spying on Rachel. Charlie gave Rachel a credit card, so monitoring Rachel's purchases is pretty much Ted's _job_. It's not hard. Rachel's pretty shitty at hiding things (most things; she's got some stuff hidden away, and Ted respects that--he checks it out, but in principle he still respects it).

So it's not like he doesn't know she bought three seasons of _Oz_ last week. It really shouldn't be a surprise at all by the time she says, "Did you and Charlie used to fuck when you were in prison?"

As it is, Ted kind of chokes on his coffee.

Rachel almost smirks as she goes back to eating her cereal, and Ted knows--it's happened to him enough times, whenever Charlie wasn't around to intervene--that he has already lost this fight in the first second, because he didn't realize it was a fight until too late. Rachel already thinks she has her answer. Rachel has been watching a lot of _Oz_.

Still, sometimes a little ground can be gained back if you do something sufficiently unexpected. Ted puts down his coffee, takes another bite of his bagel, and says casually, with his mouth full, "So that means you think we don't now?"

"You--I _live_ here," Rachel says, spoon pausing in midair.

Ted takes a mercifully uneventful sip of coffee, savoring an unexpected victory in another fight entirely. As far as Ted knows, Rachel's never said that before, never been willing to assign any permanence at all to this arrangement where she sleeps in Charlie's house and spends Charlie's money.

She drops her gaze dismissively, stirring the milk in the bowl. "Anyway, you answered my question with a question."

Ted eats more of his bagel and studies her. He considers pointing out that it's a really rude question, but it's not as if she doesn't know that. The answer to the question is only a fraction of what Rachel wants from him, and Ted sighs and sits back. She's not his kid to fight with; she's not even really a kid.

"The thing is," Ted says, thinking even as he says it that Charlie's Zen is apparently rubbing off, or else he's just internalized it as a strategy for fights he knows he's losing anyway. "The only way I can convey to you an idea of what it was actually like is to lie to you when I answer that question."

Rachel smirks a little again, like the only thing he could possibly be evading is some taint of gayness, like _that_ is the thing he should care about between him and Charlie. Rachel isn't a kid, but she's an awful fuck of a lot younger than Ted.

"Yes," he says finally, shaking his head. There's no way she'll believe _no_ at this point, and he doesn't think there's much worse she can think of Charlie than she's already spent half her life thinking. "Sure. Yes."

Rachel just says, "Huh."

* * *

Ted wishes he could just say, "Huh," and move on. Rachel did, as far as he can tell. She finished eating breakfast, washed her cereal bowl, and wandered out to sit by the pool, oblivious to the threat of coyotes. It's still niggling at Ted hours later. Eventually he gives up and does the only thing he knows to do. He calls Charlie for help.

"Crews," Charlie says, businesslike, because Charlie has not yet gotten the hang of looking at his phone to see who's calling.

"Charlie," Ted says. "Rachel's spent most of the week watching _Oz_ and now she wants to know if we used to fuck when we were inside."

There is a silence from Charlie, during which it occurs to Ted that he may be at a crime scene or something. This conversation is possibly a bad one for Charlie to be having in front of other cops.

"I'm gonna bet you don't mean the one with Dorothy and the wizard," Charlie says after a while.

"No, Charlie, I--right, ninety-five. _Oz_ is a show about prison. And there are cellmates, and they fuck."

"Huh," Charlie says, like he's related to Rachel or something. "On TV?"

"HBO," Ted says, walking over to the wall and leaning against it, so it'll be right there to beat his head on when he gets to that point in the conversation.

"Huh," Charlie repeats. "What did you tell her? Do you want me to back you up?"

"I told her yes," Ted sighs, because having this conversation with Charlie is still so goddamn much easier than thinking about any of it. "She... didn't seem like she was going to take no for an answer."

"And you didn't want me to buy her a kitchen table," Charlie says, like one is at all like the other, or like Ted's objection had been anything other than teasing. "Okay. If she asks me, that's what I'll tell her. She probably won't ask me, though. If she was going to ask me, I don't think she'd have asked you."

"Yeah," Ted says. There was really no point bringing it up to Charlie at all. Rachel thinks she understands what's in front of her, and that wasn't what the question was about. She didn't even understand what she was asking. Ted's not even sure _Charlie_ understands what she was asking--or maybe it's Ted who's got it wrong, and it really was just a trivia question over breakfast at the kitchen table. It wouldn't be the first time Ted was completely wrong about what a woman meant about anything.

"Did you ever watch it?" Charlie asks abruptly. "Before, or...?"

"Not before," Ted says, and does not add _or I probably would have killed myself after sentencing_. "After, I... not really. No. I read some plot summaries."

"Okay," Charlie says. "I have to go fight crime now, okay, Ted?"

"Yeah," Ted says, and hangs up, and then beats his head against the wall for a while. When Rachel comes back in, he's holding a beer against his forehead; she gives him a funny look and then says she called a cab, she's going shopping. Ted nods, and waits until the door closes behind her to open the beer.

* * *

Ted hears Charlie's car pull in--of course, because he lives above the garage--and he's relieved mostly because it means one more day that Charlie has survived without wrecking or losing another car. He hears Charlie go in from the garage to the house, and then he doesn't hear anything.

He's sitting on his couch, under the window that faces west, so the late sunshine reflects almost blindingly off his wedding ring as he twists it on his finger. He didn't wear it in prison, of course; the ring spent a couple of years in his bag of personal effects, returned to him with his wallet and his own clothes, when he was paroled. He still had that pale line across his finger, that indentation in the flesh, when he met Charlie.

When things really started for him and Charlie, Ted was watching that line of skin blacken and swell, alarmingly fast, as he clutched his left hand to his chest, curled in a helpless ball on the ground. He cowered back when yet another attacker loomed over him, and then an incongruous voice said, "Hey, it's okay. I'm a cop."

It had been bizarre enough to distract Ted from the overwhelming pain. He looked up as the guy crouched down over him, and recognized his cellmate. Crews.

"That's not actually reassuring," he managed to say, despite his fat lip and loosened teeth and _fingers turning black_, "because I'm a convicted felon."

"Well," Charlie said, both his hands reaching slowly through Ted's line of sight toward his battered left hand. "I was convicted, too. That's why I'm in here. I'm just a cop _more_ than I'm an inmate. Hey, I don't think these are broken, I think they're--"

Charlie's hands closed over his all at once, there was a jerk and an instant of searing, white-out pain. Charlie said brightly, "--dislocated!"

Ted stared at his hand--his fingers were already mostly the right shape again, and they hurt shockingly less. "What...?"

"To protect and serve," Charlie said softly, smiling a little. "Like I said. I'm a cop more."

Then Charlie got Ted by his wrists and pulled him up to his feet and yelled out to the yard at large, "Hey! You mess with this guy, you mess with Charlie Crews!" He subsumed Ted into his aegis of _batshit insanity_ as easily as he took Ted into his hands, and all of it turned out to be better protection than Ted would ever have expected.

For two years after that, Charlie saw him at his most pathetic, his most helpless and worthless and broken down, and Charlie picked him up and put him back together again and again. Ted spent two years watching Charlie battle through the sucking swamp of appeals, and let Charlie be his batshit crazy cop in shining orange, because that was what Charlie had to be, to be Charlie at all. And now it's supposed to matter whether--sometime in those claustrophobic years when he couldn't take a breath or take a piss without Charlie Crews being involved--somehow it matters whether he ever had Charlie's dick in his ass?

Except he's outside now, and he wears this ring now, this ring that says that it matters who fucks who and when; they gave it back to him when they let him come outside. Sometimes he thinks it matters, and when he does he's in danger of forgetting what that was like, what Charlie was to him and he was to Charlie. Sometimes he knows it doesn't matter, and then he's _back there_, itchily aware that even now--even now, with a real job and a life and some other redhead taking up altogether too much of his attention--even now, he has everything he has because if you mess with him, you mess with Charlie Crews.

"Ted?"

Charlie's voice, calling out from neutral territory down in the garage. Usually if Charlie wants something he phones and asks Ted to come over to the house, or just waits for Ted to turn up. There's not a part of Charlie's house Ted hasn't been in, not one thing Charlie keeps locked away that Ted hasn't seen, now. Since Rachel moved in, Charlie's clippings and material evidence of insanity live in a milk crate in Ted's closet, for safekeeping. But Charlie doesn't come into Ted's space.

He hasn't yet, anyway.

Ted goes to the door and opens it, calling back, "Yeah, Charlie, come on up."

He watches Charlie walk up the stairs. He thinks if he and Charlie had never been to prison--well, this would never be happening if he and Charlie hadn't been in prison. But in an analogous situation between two people who had never been to prison, the one walking up the stairs with a small, silly present in his hand might hold it behind his back.

As it is, he can see when Charlie's on the sixth step that Charlie is holding a fistful of sharpened pencils tied together with a ribbon, points up.

Charlie offers them to Ted when they're standing face-to-face at the door, and Ted snorts as he takes them. "Charlie, you shouldn't have."

"Yeah, well," Charlie waves one hand in the general direction of the house. "My... Rachel shouldn't have been a jerk. I should've..."

Twelve of the pencils are yellow #2's, perfectly smoothly machine-sharpened. The one at the center is painted black, with a lighter, shinier lead, and it's been carefully knife-sharpened to a wicked point. Ted steps back a little, into better light, and pulls it out. It's a 9H. It's _contraband_.

"You know you could kill a man with this," Ted says thoughtfully, hefting it in his hand. The lead's strong enough not to break, almost too strong to actually write with.

"Straight through the eye and don't stop pushing until it's gone," Charlie agrees cheerfully. "I told Rachel I never got to see _Oz_ because we didn't have HBO in Pelican Bay, but I'd like to watch it with her sometime. She said she was going to be busy washing her hair for the foreseeable future."

"She said, earlier." Ted takes another step back, and Charlie is leaning in the doorframe now, nearly inside. "She said she lives here, you know. So..."

Charlie lights up with a huge, ridiculous smile, and Ted smiles too, just as ridiculous or more so. Rachel's not even his--whatever she is to Charlie (_ward_ would be the classic term, and between that and Charlie taking her to crime scenes at night, Rachel is a shoe-in for Robin to Charlie's Batman, while Ted is still just ... Batman's cellie from that stint Batman did in the joint, learning knife-fighting and Zen), but Ted is happy because Charlie's happy. He can't help it.

"You wanna come in?" Ted takes another step back, gesturing vaguely toward the couch, and Charlie's smile brightens another notch, so Ted's does too. He finds himself thinking of that solar farm (he never had a thing for redheads until four years ago) about light reflected and energy stored, and he turns away saying, "I've gotta find something to put these in, they're beautiful."

Charlie laughs a little more, and even with his back turned to Charlie, even after Charlie falls silent, Ted knows where he is. Ted always knows where Charlie is in a room, so even though he's mostly thinking about which coffee mug to put the pencils in, he's not taken by surprise when Charlie's hand touches his back. Anybody else, he'd have jumped three feet away before they actually made contact, but he stands still for Charlie. Maybe he shifts his weight onto his heels instead of reaching forward for the mug he was thinking of, maybe straightens his spine.

"Ted," Charlie says, and his voice is tentative but the weight of his hand is sure. He doesn't want Ted to turn around; he wants to keep Ted exactly at arm's length for this. "I don't think Rachel--I think she thought you were just humoring her because it was an embarrassing question and you wanted her to shut up."

"Yeah, I know," Ted says. It hasn't been Rachel he's been thinking about all day, and if he cared what Rachel thought he'd have called _her_. He looks down at the pencils Charlie brought him, Charlie's little apology to the man who holds everything Charlie has in the palm of his hand.

"Yeah," Charlie says, and his hand twitches a little against Ted's shirt. Ted knows that that means Charlie wants to hold on harder and won't let himself. "We're--this is okay, isn't it, Ted? We're okay?"

He knows what Charlie means--not necessarily this method of having conversations without eye contact. Charlie's asking about this arrangement of everything, where Ted gets asked troubling questions about his relationship with Charlie because Charlie is, more or less, the center of Ted's life. Everyone in the world can see it and make assumptions about it, from Rachel on out.

There are few words less apt than _okay_ to describe it. Living with Charlie means it's never really over. Living with Charlie means he never has to _pretend_ it's really over, or that it was something other than what it was. He can't pretend even when he wants to.

Ted's hand opens and closes on the 9H pencil that Charlie sharpened for him to a lethal point. Charlie's hand is heavy on Ted's back--wanting to hold on harder and not letting himself. Charlie knows what he's asking Ted, but the only way to be honest to Charlie about what it means is to lie when he answers the question Charlie actually asked.

"Yes," Ted says, and Charlie's hand lifts a little, so Ted turns and looks him in the eye as he says, "Yeah, Charlie, it's okay."

Charlie smiles, so Ted smiles, and lets the pencil dangle from his fingers, almost forgotten.


End file.
